Posted on October 1, 2009 - by Eric
Unity3d Game Portals
In Flash game development, the primary way developers earn is to have flash game portals sponsor their game. Sponsoring primarily means turning a game into a traffic building content as well as a brand-building product. This is done by inserting sponsor’s logos all around the game’s scenes. This has been the main driving force in the flash game content business for some time.
Unity3d on the web is slowly but surely gaining traction amongst game developers. So its only a matter of time before the sponsorship model will be adopted in the space as well. A few pieces of the puzzle need to be in place for that to happen. One vital piece that is missing are game portals. 3 notable ones are gaining momentum and may become the Kongregate, Newgrounds or Miniclip of 3d games in the near future. Let us take a look at each of them.
Muse games is first with a pure Unity3d slate of games. As you’d expect its a slim selection with only 4 games but the site’s got a strong stake on microtransactions with a store for some of its game. A card deck and some clothes, furnitures are available for purchase.
Still in top secret beta phase, dimeRocker seems to be poised for some action with zombie and pirate games in tow. They are a constant presence in activities where the Unity devs are so hopefully this close association will result to something awesome when they go live. Perhaps some plugins for high scores and trial / full version locks.
Finally, there is Wooglie.com who is actively courting Unity developers to upload their games to their site. Some sort of CPM-sharing is offered there. Its got a good approach of mixing flash games and the unity3d games. Flash games drive the traffice while the unity games gives it differentiation. It seems it only looks like flash game portals and do not have any flash games at all. Still its a good strategy to capitalize on the familiar user experience. Wooglie has the best selection of unity3d games amongst the sites featured here.
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These game portals are trying very different approaches to building their audience and its very interesting to see how it plays out. But one things for sure, any success from these website will grow the whole 3d web games market and when the rising tides comes, all boats are lifted.
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October 1, 2009
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Jeff Weber said:
This is good to see. I’m not a Unity developer, I actually use Silverlight for my games, but I’m always interested to see portals supporting platforms other than just Flash.
I’d actually like to see more sites support Flash, Unity, and Silvelight..
Only one I know of so far that does that is: http://gamejolt.com/online/games/action/
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October 1, 2009
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Eric said:
I am actually a fan of gamejolt but I wasnt aware they have Unity / silverlight games. I thought it was java/game maker/c games they were differentiating on. Silverlight seems to be focusing on being a great media player but being a silverlight game developer could be a good niche to be on. How is it? From where I am standing, XNA seems to be the better one to back as far as MS products go. it builds to exe, xbox and zune.
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October 2, 2009
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Jeff Weber said:
I enjoy developing games in Silverlight.
I chose it because I wanted to focus on smaller games and I like the idea of them being playable in the browser.
I also chose it because I have a lot of experience in Microsoft technologies.
While I think XNA is a cool tech, I find Siliverlight more straightforward to develop in.
I also am betting that Silverlight has a bright future. It’s on the web for windows and mac, it’ll be part or the WinMobile 7 platform (this could be huge), it’s on the XBox (just for advertising purposes right now but that could change… think XBox browser with Silverlight support.)
It is a bit of a niche right now and I’m fine with that. My goals are long term so I don’t need things to move at light-speed.
-Jeff
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October 2, 2009
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Mike said:
The article states Wooglie hosts flash games, but it does not.
Wooglie hosts unity3d games only and we have no plans to support flash games (as those will usually be of a different quality/type any way).
Thanks for this article.
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October 2, 2009
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Eric said:
real sorry about that, Wooglie looks like one of those flash portal which is a good strategy whether its intentional or not. will edit the article.
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October 2, 2009
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Eric said:
agreed. The winmo integration could be huge. Well, anytime I think of silverlight games I think of your games so youre on the right track there.
Good luck!
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October 3, 2009
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Chris said:
I’d just like to note that FlashGameLicense.com (despite what the name may suggest!) helps developers working on any platform, including Unity, to sell their games.
And Shockwave is a huge site that I see missing from the list here.
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October 3, 2009
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Glen said:
I would not really call dimeRocker a portal. The concept is actually the opposite. It is about delivering the content to the people and not having the dual challenge of attracting people to a portal and then the game. We skip a step.
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October 3, 2009
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Porter said:
It’ll be neat to see how fast unity grows, I don’t know if I’ll develop for it, but I’m definitely interested in seeing it going places.
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October 3, 2009
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Eric said:
@porter well, unity3d is really good for 3d games and NOT good for 2d games. so that boils it down to 2d vs 3d. On another note, thank God your blog text color is now unPinked.
@Glen – very interesting. are you gonna sell downloadable unity games? subscription?
@Chris – i dont see the upload tools for unity and explicit instructions saying so. it would behoove you guys to point that fact in the home page (logged out) and in the upload screen. I would guess more unity / shockwave developers trying then. Shockwave.com is not a unity3d focused site as i recall but maybe i shouldve not discarded them in the list.
will re-add them.
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October 22, 2009
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Glen said:
Eric – we can and do but we really want our developers to embrace the microtransaction model to maximize the long term revenue of the game. If you are coming to Unite – see us at the Tipsy Pig for our party on Wednesday the 28th – email and I will get you the details
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October 22, 2009
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Ben said:
Unity can do 2D just fine. You’d need to roll your own sprite frame controller if you wanted to go for image animation instead of 2.5d, but the benefits you’d get over Flash from it being on the GPU would be very worthwhile.
Most Flash devs that get going with Unity are really excited by the performance difference.